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RTCNA Enables Glimpses into the Future

I have a bunch of posts related to the Revit Technology Conference North America (RTCNA) in draft. I thought it was time to get one of them out there for you. RTCNA was held in Schaumburg, Illinois a week ago. While it was near Chicago, it certainly wasn’t an easy trip from one to the other. I’ll have to see that city another day.

Peering into the Future

I have so many things to tell you about, not the least of which involve Dynamo and complex form-making in the Revit environment. That’ll have to wait until next time. In this post, I want to bring your attention to some shiny things. Shiny, as in new, or soon to be newly available to incorporate into your digital practice. Apologies in advance for the blurry photos. Looking into the future requires a lot of computational power, and the images we receive back are a bit degraded – OK, the real reason is I don’t have the latest and greatest smart phone (snicker).

Coming soon to a BIM platform near you

One of the benefits of attending conferences is the occasional unexpected announcement of future things to come. While this was only my second RTC, I was amazed how much Autodesk let us peak behind the curtain. Some of the announcements were sprinkled among regular sessions, and others featured in keynotes.

This also marks the first year Autodesk has become a significant sponsor of the RTC worldwide. RTC North America , a conference for users – by users, is an excellent place for learning and networking with peers, it’s also seem to become a good litmus test for Autodesk to observe reaction to possible strategies. Almost passing quietly, as I’ve seen no one else write about these topics below, there will certainly be more fanfare later this year, at that ‘other’ conference put on by the vendor themselves. Don’t get me wrong. I like both events for different reasons. RTC is certainly a more intimate setting, and as it’s name suggests is more of a concentrated, Revit ecosystem focused event.

Before getting started; a little housekeeping. All of what I’m about to say is: a). subject to change, b). was announced publicly in front of the sold out 500 person event and c). that I have no special inside scoop which I am able to comment on beyond this article.

Blocks

Anthony Hauck, Senior Product Line Manager, Building Group at Autodesk, had several future industry trends to discuss, more on that later. Pretty colors. What to make of this? Notice the indication of an egress stair? Could it be the long sought after jackalope err, Conceptual Space Planning tools? Is it Revit? Hmmm. Is it FormIt, or perhaps some other mobile or web-based environment? Little was revealed about this image and it was still enough to make people stir in their seats, murmur for a bit and then spontaneously cheer and applaud. Although, it was indicated that a handful of people from RTC (whose names were literally picked out of a hat OK – Hauck’s messenger bag) will be testing this new tool later this summer. I am very eager to know more. This has been one area where we have struggled to find the right tool to help with blocking and stacking. Mass families representing departments (jelly-cubes) or rooms (Jell-O shots) have been a partial answer inside Revit – although they have their limitations.

FormIt, All Grown Up

Staying in the conceptual world, we move toward my favorite little modeler, FormIt. My Tiny House project www.unboxedhouse.com was even featured in the FormIt session. The development of this tool (AutodeskFormIt.com) has really matured since it’s introduction in November of 2012. I discovered that you can export to OBJ file format for 3D printing. It is now on the cusp of its seventh major release, where we will see some very interesting new features and workflows. Just a few of the things to come which we saw in the working demo of the upcoming versions by Scott Davis, AEC Technical Specialist at Autodesk and co-presented by Tobias Hawthorn, Senior User Experience Designer at Autodesk, who joined the session remotely:

V6.6 (available now)

Weather Data dashboard – for iPad and Android tablets, pick a site location and the nearest weather station may be selected to see temperature and wind data. Let’s hope more graphs are added soon.

Android feature parity – so you have a choice, the Android app now does everything the iPad version can do

v7.0 (mobile coming soon)

Open profiles – adding the ability to sketch a partial loop, and have the lines remain, for closing later to make a surface or form

Reference lines – while sketching, reference lines will display for ensuring your work is easier to create parallel or perpendicular conditions

Snapping tools – just like in the big boy CAD modeling tools. There was an indication this may be limited to the web based version, and take a bit longer to appear (if at all) on the mobile apps.

v7.0 (web coming soon)

Everything above, plus… it seems like the web will be out of beta.

Live collaboration – this was previewed at AU last December as a teaser. Earlier this month, we saw it demonstrated for the first time. It looks very promising.

Array improvements – adding the ability to array a line or face, arrays of a form can now be done in 3D.

Copy/Paste improvements – control over insertion of pasted elements rather than them popping in unexpectedly. There will also be an added bonus – auto join of faces. This may become a fun thing to experiment with, to see what other games beyond Tetris can be simulated.

Come with me if you want to BIM

Perhaps the most exciting announcement, was during Zach Kron’s class “The Day Families Became Self-Aware” – yes that most certainly is a Terminator reference. Zach, a Principal Design Strategist at Autodesk, and long-time blogger at buildz, he is deeply involved in furthering the open-source Dynamo development. Dubbed Project Honeycomb, this technology proposes to embed intelligence into a Revit family, by allowing a piece of code to be injected into it. It is currently a prototype, model 101 if you will.

To illustrate the power of the concept, Zach showed a working prototype as a special build of Revit, and was able to fluidly do what is either extremely difficult or impossible for mere mortals to achieve with today’s Revit. So, say you’ve written this amazing Dynamo definition, or a Python script, or a macro using an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) such as Microsoft Visual Studio. That’s great. Now, take that code and load it into a family, and it will perform the action in the project environment. As shown in the demo, it will perform at the native Revit engine speed, because Dynamo or whatever authored the code is not needed for producing the results.

Complex interactions between families could be possible, and be very, very fast. Those families would also need less complex parameter configurations and formulae to do the heavy lifting, as code like that generated with Dynamo manages the relationships rather than traditional and rather archaic family construction techniques. The other advantage? The democratization of Design Computation, or as I like to call it in this new paradigm – Computational BIM. Anyone, anywhere can use these families that take on superpowers.

The session was very interactive, allowing a great discussion of how we might implement a technology like this and how it should function.

When I described this to a colleague, one who is immersed in design computation daily, his reaction without even seeing the presentation was, “That’s a Grasshopper killer, right there”. I was very surprised hear those words, even though I agree. I can’t wait to see what this new world looks like. I, for one, welcome our new computational overlords.

One more thing

Anthony Hauk, gave a great talk about where the future of BIM is heading, titled ‘BIM: The Next 5 Years’. If this slide is any indication of things Autodesk may be thinking about enabling, we’ll see a dramatically more effective use of BIM than in practice today.

The last bit I want to leave you with, which was announced last week at the AIA National Convention (also held in Chicago), is Project Skyscraper. While details are still a bit sketchy, this sounds like a very big deal. Autodesk will be rolling out a cloud collaboration toolset as part of their 360 platform to enable remote team members to work simultaneously on the same Revit model, “eliminating the need for firms to invest in costly IT set-ups”. See more about this announcement at: In The Fold

I am so jazzed by what’s around the corner. I’ll see you there soon.

Corrections from original post:Snapping will be in the mobile app as well as the web, and live collaboration will not be in v7.0 for mobile. That feature will be web only in it’s first iteration.

2 comments on “RTCNA Enables Glimpses into the Future”

Embedding logic into Revit Families will be a game changer. The ability to use actual code to express family logic can truly change manufacturer content as we know it. Most of the complex MEP content we create really needs a configurator as the configurable variables and logic needed to be aware of design conditions far exceeds current Revit parameter capabilities. Providing c# code to handle the logic will change the game.

If this functionality goes even further to provide the ability for families to be aware of their surroundings and aware of “design conditions” then we can get to a place where the BIM model starts to flag analytical conflicts and fix itself by auto specifying new products. For example, lets say you have a connected CFM load that is higher than the VAV box can handle without changing to the next larger size. With “Self aware” content, the VAV box could update itself to the next largest size while updating its branch connection from say 6″ to 8″ etc.